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Elision PDF
Elision PDF
Elision PDF
Quite simply, elision is all about dropping sounds or not pronouncing them fully in fluent
speech.
As you worked your way through some of the material in the exercise above, you may have
noticed that sometimes, words seem to have letters missing within the phonetic
transcription. For instance, we know that the word round is pronounced /raʊnd/ and the
word to is pronounced /tə/. However, when the words are used together as in round to,
we often drop the final /d/, so that phonetically it reads /raʊn tə/. This is because /t/ and
/d/ are both labio-dental sounds, and we tend to drop one – in this case the voiced /d/.
This is called elision.
This is one of the aspects of sentence stress that we need to consider when guiding and
teaching our students, as opposed to pointing them towards isolated phonetic dictionary
entries.
In English, stress placement in sentences and rhythm are part and parcel of everyday
speech. As a result, stress placement is variable depending upon the meaning and the
effect sought. This is quite a large area of phonetics, so for now we will simply identify
some regular features of stress placement in connected utterances. Some words regularly
attract the stress, while others don’t. Those that are regularly unstressed are:
You will notice that these are primarily grammatical words, rather than content words such
as nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc. We might think of them as ‘small’ words but technically
they are called ‘function’ words.
/h/ and /j/ tend not to create this elision but other consonants can in rapid speech.
Cruttenden (2008: 303-4) provides a number of useful examples that show the
vulnerability of /t/ and /d/ in combinations such as -pt, -kt, -st, -ft, -ʃt, -ʧt, -bd,
-gd, -nd, -ld, -zd, -ʤd, -vd, -ðd:
This can occur in several environments. In connected speech /ə/ can easily
disappear at word boundaries when the sound comes at the start of a word,
positioned between two stressed syllables, as in:
go away /ˈgəʊ_ˈweɪ/
police /pliːs/
Elision can also occur when the sound comes in the middle or final combinations as in:
/h/ is lost in pronominal weak forms (i.e. the weak form of the pronoun) when they
don’t occur at the start of an utterance. As you can see from the example below, the
/h/ of the two masculine pronouns is retained at the beginning of the sentence –
‘He’, but gets elided when it occurs for a second time, in the middle of the sentence.
is pronounced
We see this even more when we are teaching French learners. Take a look at the box
below for details.
In French, there is no /h/ so French speakers will often carry this over when speaking in
English and leave out the /h/, as in ‘e ‘asn’t seen ‘im today. Try getting your French
speakers to open their mouths and produce aspirated /h/sound, and then say hot, head and
heart. See here for an example of the /h/ sound on the phonemic chart:
http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/try/activities/phonemic-chart
Kerry McEwan, one of our English tutors at Global English, says that she gets her French
speaking students to say:
"I hear with my ears"